Connector Support in the Application Server

The Application Server supports the development and deployment of
resource adapters that are compatible with Connector specification
(and, for backward compatibility, the Connector 1.0 specification).

The Connector 1.0 specification defines the outbound connectivity
system contracts between the resource adapter and the Application Server.
The Connector 1.5 specification introduces major additions in defining
system level contracts between the Application Server and the resource
adapter with respect to the following:

Inbound connectivity from an EIS - Defines the transaction
and message inflow system contracts for achieving inbound connectivity
from an EIS. The message inflow contract also serves as a standard
message provider pluggability contract, thereby allowing various providers
of messaging systems to seamlessly plug in their products with any
application server that supports the message inflow contract.

Resource adapter life cycle management and thread
management - These features are available through the lifecycle and
work management contracts.

Connector Architecture for JMS and JDBC

In the Admin Console, connector, JMS, and JDBC resources are
handled differently, but they use the same underlying Connector architecture.
In the Application Server, all communication to an EIS, whether to a message
provider or an RDBMS, happens through the Connector architecture.
To provide JMS infrastructure to clients, the Application Server uses the Sun Java System Message Queue software.
To provide JDBC infrastructure to clients, the Application Server uses
its own JDBC system resource adapters. The application server automatically
makes these system resource adapters available to any client that
requires them.

Connector Configuration

The Application Server does not need to use sun-ra.xml, which previous Application Server versions
used, to store server-specific deployment information inside a Resource
Adapter Archive (RAR) file. (However, the sun-ra.xml file
is still supported for backward compatibility.) Instead, the information
is stored in the server configuration. As a result, you can create
multiple connector connection pools for a connection definition in
a functional resource adapter instance, and you can create multiple
user-accessible connector resources (that is, registering a resource
with a JNDI name) for a connector connection pool. In addition, dynamic
changes can be made to connector connection pools and the connector
resource properties without restarting the Application Server.